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Capitol discovery

Posted: Sunday, June 22, 2003

By Smithsonian magazineAssociated Press

After Senate staffers Clare Weeks Amoruso and Douglas Connolly finished cleaning out a storeroom in the subbasement of the U.S Capitol this past November, they found floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with dust-covered boxes of decades-old insurance brochures and payroll records.Smithsonian/AP

After Senate staffers Clare Weeks Amoruso and Douglas Connolly finished cleaning out a storeroom in the subbasement of the U.S Capitol this past November, they noticed a door to a nearby room ajar.

Curious, they walked inside and found floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with dust-covered boxes of decades-old insurance brochures and payroll records. Then the spine of a book bound in cloth and leather caught Connolly's eye. Stacked carelessly with others on a low shelf, and bearing the dates 1790-1881 in gilt digits, the book was blandly titled ''Senators Compensation and Mileage.''

Opening the large, dusty volume, they found its rag-paper pages covered with notes in ornate script, and column after column of numbers within neat rules, and names in lists, and signatures writ large. ''All of a sudden,'' Connolly relays to Philip Kopper in the June issue of Smithsonian magazine, ''there was Thomas Jefferson.'' Here, too, was Aaron Burr and John Adams, whose signature matched that on the dust jacket of David McCullough's biography of Adams, which Amoruso was then reading. ''It was an 'oh my God' kind of moment,'' she said.

Connolly called the historian of the Senate, Richard Baker, who came running. One look at the book told Baker that he ''was holding something significant.'' Here was the long-lost official payroll and expense register for the Senate's first 90 years, the one-of-a-kind record of every dollar paid to senators in wages and travel reimbursements.

Not only was it the genuine article, Baker reported ''there is nothing that remotely comes close to it in the archives of the Senate.'' The ledger chronicles spending in the Senate from the time it had 26 members representing 13 states until it had 76 from 38 states. To historians, Kopper writes, its raw data promise a lode of information and insights to be coaxed and tweaked from its pages. Baker found notations accompanying entries for Senate stipends during a special session on March 4, 1801, which revealed that the world's greatest deliberative body advised and consented to the appointment of President John Adams' entire cabinet in a single day.

The ledger also shows that senators were paid $6 per day when the legislature was in session. Travel was reimbursed at 30 cents a mile for up to 20 miles a day - the federal government's first per diem perk. Two centuries later, senators are reimbursed at only 6 cents more a mile for road trips.

A digital facsimile of the ledger soon will appear on the Senate Web site, www.senate.gov. Ultimately, it will be on display at the Senate visitors' center, scheduled for completion in 2005 - just yards away from where it sat in the dusty dark for decades. ''The book speaks volumes,'' Baker said, but it will take time for historians to unlock all its myriad secrets. ''It will speak very slowly, having been silent for so long.''